Cory Doctorow

But I don't know if you realize this.

MySpace is owned by this evil, crapulent, senescent, immortal vampire Australian billionaire named Rupert Murdoch, who spies on you with every hour that God sends.

And the last thing anyone should ever want is to be on social media owned by a billionaire that spies on you.

Come to Facebook, and we'll never spy on you, and we'll just show you the things you asked to see.

And so we pile in, and we lock ourselves in, because you love your friends, but they're a pain in the ass, and you can't agree on what board game you're going to play this weekend.

So you definitely can't agree on when it's time to leave Facebook.

Mark Zuckerberg knows this, and he understands that so long as you love your friends more than you hate him, he can make life worse for you, and you'll stay there.

So that's stage two, making things good for business customers by making them bad for end users.

So it goes to advertisers, and he says, do you remember, we told these rubes we weren't going to spy on them.

Obviously, that was a lie.

We spy on them from asshole to appetite.

And if you give us a remarkably small amount of money, we will target ads to them with exquisite fidelity.

And because we're such dedicated craftspeople, we've got this whole building full of anti-fraud engineers who are going to make sure that when you give us a dollar to show an ad to a kind of user, we're going to stuff that ad in that user's face.

And then he goes to the publishers and he says, do you remember we told these suckers we were only going to show them the things they asked to see?

Also a lie.

Take stuff from your website, put it on my website, add a link to the bottom.

We'll cram it into the eyeballs of people who never asked to see it.

Some of them will click the link, free traffic.

So they pile in, they get locked in too.

They become dependent on us.